Little Kuba appeared by my side when I was waving my bait over frustrating fish in the clear water of Ningaloo Reef.

“What are you catching?” After I explained the big fish could be seen swimming around lazily while the little black one’s kept pecking my bait to bits, the five-year-old blond boy announced he was going to get his rod too.

We were on a rocky shelf only a few meters from where Isabel was parked at Pigramunna site on Cape Range National Park around the point from Exmouth.  The boy and his family had pulled in with their campervan the day before and were camped in the next bay.

“Hope you don’t mind the noise. We are only here for one night,” said the cheerful dad with an unusual accent. He introduced himself as Alek. His wife Gina said hello and the little Nowak family of four proceeded to restore our faith not only in the raising of children in Australia but also in the value of people from other nations who come to this land to work hard and cherish the lifestyle.

Kuba and his little sister Klaudia, 3, raced around the sand, explored, splashed and swam, hopped on and off Dad’s kayak and a boogie board, laughed, yelled, argued and cried a little over falls, tiffs and scratches. Alek and Gina let them go, keeping an eye from a distance except when Alek would join them in bouts of boisterous play on the sand that involved loud, delighted shrieking.

Alek from Warsaw was an exemplary enthusiastic father. Gina from Wisconsin was no helicopter mother. Together they were an impressively targeted couple determined to extract what they loved from life.

One of the reasons why we avoid caravan parks is because you usually end up sleeping within spitting distance of strangers but we enjoyed eavesdropping on the noisy evening routine of the Nowak children. Cape Range has no reception; not an electronic game had had been in sight. Bedtime was a mixture of laughing games with letters and numbers mixed with more shrieking as Alek told loud monster stories.

In the morning Alek slipped on his snorkelling gear and went out on his kayak to search for crayfish. Gina played with Kuba and Klaudia on the beach – until Kuba realised someone was fishing. Gina scampered back to get Kuba’s fishing rod. I was impressed by his casting skill but tested by his requests to change tackle. We walked around the bay to the rocks where Tony had the gear.

As we walked past the camp area, Kuba told me the monster had written a letter saying he would be coming on Saturday. “Today’s Saturday,” I said. We decided we would keep a careful watch on their campervan.

Gina and Klaudia joined us. Alek paddled in; Kuba hopped on the kayak with him to paddle back across the bay. The water was getting a little choppy but that didn’t stop Kuba joining Alek to snorkel the near reef in deeper, rougher water than I liked to explore. Kuba informed me they had seen hundreds of mangrove jack, “or maybe a dozen”.

I learned Alek had left Poland when he was 16 to go to high school in Wisconsin, moving on to university where he met Gina. He studied marketing in international business; Gina studied journalism.

In 1997 Alek studied for a semester in Australia at Deakin. Gina joined him to travel the Cairns, Darwin, Alice and Melbourne route.

“When we went back, every step we took we were thinking about how to get back to Australia,” said Gina.

“We finished our degrees and worked for two years in Detroit, Michigan, and were really tired of the rat race. We sold everything we had and came back to Australia in 2000. We travelled around here for a year in a Kombi called Sparky.”

Alek’s friends in the US corporate world cautioned him about throwing away his career prospects and the pathway to financial security but the young couple delighted in exploring with Sparky, always keeping their eye out for a place that offered the outdoor lifestyle they loved. Exmouth was high on the list of favoured places.

They settled for a year in Perth. Alek studied hospitality and dive resort management; Gina earned her teaching degree.

“Every step we planned to get back to Ningaloo,” said Gina. They made it 10 years ago, prepared to start at the bottom. Alek worked behind a bar; Gina picked up work lecturing at what is now the Durack Institute of Technology.

Alek took on a deckhand job on the Exmouth glass-bottom tourist reef boat; two years later he was manager and three years ago he bought the business. Meanwhile Gina had the two children and in 2006 became manager of the institute.

In three years they plan to travel around Australia again, home-schooling Kuba and Klaudia in something bigger than Sparky. In the meantime they revel in the laid-back life at Exmouth.

Alek thought when asked if he missed anything from Poland. Maybe the architecture, he said, recalling the streets of centuries-old buildings. In Exmouth, all buildings are stark and functional in fine cyclone-proof style.

A broad grin broke through the thoughtful look: “But hey, that’s such a small price to pay to live in paradise. And all those corporate friends back in the US ….. there’s not one of them wouldn’t swap places with me now in an instant.”

I felt buoyed by meeting the Nowak family. So many Australians born in this land have so much they could learn about the real wealth and joy that lie in this land.

ABOVE: Alex and Kuba return from a snorkelling adventure.

No houses can be rented for less than $3500 in Onslow. Food and fuel are both expensive and the 800 permanent residents are either reeling or rejoicing as the giant Wheatstone gas plant mushrooms a few kilometres down the coast.

About 5000 workers are beavering away on the construction site, a 45-minute drive away. Wheatstone employees are not allowed into the town except on special occasions; those housed at the Discovery caravan park are bussed to and from the work site.

Prices at the second caravan park are fairly steep if you can get a site – many permanents are mine workers too.

Onslow is an intriguing town caught in a transition that shows the dichotomy of wealth and hardship created by the resources boom of northern Australia. We had skipped the town on previous trips to WA and no one recommended it since but we decided to poke the 80km into the town best known for its battering from cyclones.

It has a salt mine with 500 to 600 workers and an early history of pearling and gold along with its old port, the main reason for the town evolving in the early 1980s. The town moved from the early site after the Ashburton River silted up and now sits on the coast near Beadon Point.

It has a superb war memorial park facing out to sea (see seat sculpture above) , beaches and fishing spots near the town, half a kilometre of free camping along the Ashburton, a public water point in town and a terrific visitors centre and museum.

Carol Stratford, the vivacious manager of the visitors centre, is an enthusiastic promoter of her town. The museum’s prize exhibit is the train that used to run from the jetty to the town but the cyclone stories are absorbing.

Onslow is Australia’s most cyclone-prone town. It has had a biennial average of cyclones with winds of more than 95kmh. Cyclone Trixie in 1975 smashed the aenometer at 246km.

In 1961 three cyclones hit in six weeks, one dropping the barometric pressure to 27.3 inches – an Australasian record. The town sort of shuts down for tourists in the summer cyclone season because the shelters don’t have enough room for caravanners and the sites don’t have tie-downs as in Karratha. The contractors have to leave when the town goes on yellow alert.

Large murals have been put up beside the quaint little train to tell Onslow’s chequered story at the museum (which also closes for summer). It was a submarine supply base and was the southern-most Australian city bombed by the Japanese in WW11. In the 1950s it was a base for the British atomic tests at Montebello Islands.

It’s well worth the drive in to contemplate the town and its story, told in the museum and in conversations with the locals.

Carol is cautious about the effects Wheatstone is having on the town but points to some amenities that have been provided by the gas industry. Her visitor numbers are down to 25%, however, because tourists have been frightened away by prices and scarcity of caravan sites.

That is a shame. Onslow’s history is absorbing and its current economic dilemmas are thought-provoking.

No one is quite sure what the long-term effects of Wheatstone will be on Onslow. The second largest gas development in Australia (Inpex in Darwin will be bigger) is expected to have thousands on-site in construction and development for the next 15 to 20 years but after that only a few hundred will remain as operational crew.

Wheatstone employment for local workers and contractors is petering out. Apart from Discovery, the rest of the workers are FIFO and rarely seen.

Apparently Chevron originally wanted to build the Wheatstone plant right in Onslow but locals were alarmed at what would happen to their town. Chevron changed plans and built a little down the coast to process the off-shore gas. Now they are talking about a supermarket, bowling alley and other facilities being built at the Wheatstone site.

What that will all mean in 20 years is difficult to assess but lessons to be learned lie in Onslow.

‘You’re not the man I want,” I told the big man with the impressive beard who walked into the Beadon Bay Hotel at Onslow.

Seeing I was probably older than Tom Taylor’s mother, he was vastly relieved but not overly surprised.

We had been enjoying a sensational beer (any cold beer in a cool pub in 40+ heat is sensational) and studying some unusual but uncaptioned black and white photos from Australia’s glorious sporting days. I thought I recognised a gangly racehorse, probably chestnut, but no one at our table knew its identity.

As the big bloke towered past I thought I would ask him. “Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help me.”

Tom Taylor turned but he had already uttered a dozen syllables to the bar attendant. The accent was a dead giveaway. He would not have a clue if that photo was of Phar Lap, even if the Americans were accused of murdering Australia’s most famous Kiwi racehorse.

Tom (pictured) is from South Carolina, which accounted for the broad accent. He turned out to be one of the most genial, funny corrosion engineers to entertain us. That was because we had never met a corrosion engineer before but we could understand why one was in Onslow.

Like Dampier, Onslow is approached on a roadway flanked by hectares of fields evaporating H2O from the sea. Close to 600 people work in the salt mine, with a 1.3km loading jetty at Beadon Point taking salt from the processing plant to ships where it sails away to become caustic soda, chlorine or soda ash and is then converted to paper, fabric, detergents and plastics.

As the second largest exporter of salt in Western Australia after Dampier, Onslow can produce about 2.5 million tonnes of salt a year. The industry is now being dwarfed by the giant Chevron Wheatstone gas project that will employ about 5000 people for about 15 years of construction, tearing apart the social and cost structure of the town.

However salt - or rather the rusting effects of it - had brought 28-year-old Tom Taylor on a flying visit to Onslow. He shook our hands, remembered all our names and chatted amiably – social tactics he learned from his politician dad, a Republican hovering quietly over the middle ground in the red hot conservatism of the Deep South.

Tom was hanging out at the Onslow pub waiting for a plane to take him back to Perth, where he has been based for a year.  He had been flown up that morning to assess a corrosion problem that took an hour to sort out.

Tom never wanted to be a corrosion engineer and he advised us to look with great suspicion upon anyone who claims to have yearned since the age of eight to follow a career in rust busting.

“It’s a bit better than watching paint dry but not much.” Most metallurgists who were corrosion engineers “sort of drifted into” the specialised field, he said.

He had been involved in a much more exciting line of work, developing ceramic armour plating for the military, but in the end the US military decided against using it.

Being a rust buster was not too bad, however. It took him to some interesting places. He spent a couple of years in Saudi Arabia and in his time off relaxed in some idyllic coves on the Greek islands.

He loves Australia. “You guys don’t appreciate what you have here with all the open spaces, the weather, the scenery and the laid-back lifestyle.”

Tom Taylor wouldn’t mind finding the future Mrs Taylor in Australia but while marriage might be on the cards settling down with a family is some time off. Too much of the world waits to be explored and fortunately a lot of it is getting corroded. So who do you call? Rust busters.

 

The flies arrived with daughter Amber and fiancé Dean. So did lots of other bugs.

Promotional guff about inviting places never mentions the flies, the mosquitoes or the sandflies. Or other strange insects.

“Let’s go to Cleaverville,” we said to Amber and Dean when they arrived at Dampier. They were on their week off from a mine near Karajini, exploring WA with Landcruiser, swag and fishing rods.

We had camped two nights before at the beachside, council-run Cleaverville, between Karratha and Roebourne. The camping ground was closed after the winter tourist season, which meant it was free instead of a small fee being paid to the ranger.

Back we trotted to Cleaverville to be greeted by wall-to-wall bush flies, as persistent as any we had ever met. “They weren’t here two days ago,” we said apologetically to the miners, peering at each other from behind head fly nets. “The sandflies were though.”

Tiny little buggers that could crawl through screens. We fished, relaxed and sipped cold beer wriggled under the nets. Winds howled on and off. Tony and Dean caught a couple of decent mud crabs then we pinged off to 40 Mile Beach south of Dampier where the “closed so it’s free” rule applied again.

We perched in a picturesque spot, fished and fought flies. Mercifully few sandflies appeared. Amber and Dean had taken to sleeping on top of Toddy Toyota to escape flying and biting creatures and heat but a sudden screaming wind almost hurled them into a magic carpet ride.

Tony stood knee-deep in water wondering if there was any substance to the crocodile warning sign. A loud splashing behind him was followed by a thrashing in front. He said something like “Oh my gosh” before high-tailing and high-stepping back to shore from a friendly metre-long shark, much to the enduring amusement of his future son-in-law.

Near the Old Onslow ruins is a superb free campsite along half a kilometre of the Ashburton River. It was closed but free. If you stay more than three nights you are supposed to let the council know, presumably in case of a need for evacuation. In the mid-summer the Three Mile Pool closes altogether because it is too wet but in the shoulder season you have your pick of the sites.

Here the miners were to have insect encounters of new kinds. Dozens of 25mm, black crunching beetles tried to get into the roof-top swag. Some made it. Some found the wooden chopping board and three bored their way into the timber.

The swag was tossed under a tree during the day. After dinner a repetitive, awed “Oh my God, Oh my God” came from Amber as they went to sling the swag rooftop for the night. A thousand or more light brown beetles had encrusted the swag (ABOVE). They seemed harmless but took some brushing to persuade them to leave the swag they had mobbed.

We retreated thankfully into Isabel. Some things are better left to younger adventurers.

 

We like Broome but it’s a bit of a take. It is primed for the tourist dollar and so their much-lauded Staircase to the Moon advertisements don’t tell the full story.

I have to admit they have done a grand job of promoting the staircase, which happens three nights a lunar month when the moon is full and the tide is low. It is actually just a few tidal undulations in the mudflats looking east across Roebuck harbour. The moon rises and reflects off the mud ripples, creating a ladder effect.

Apparently the excitement this causes is related to the fact that the moon is rising from the east over water. Or mud, actually.  From Darwin west it is all about sunsets over the water. Back east we have sunrise over water but people are usually in bed, still sleepy or trying to get to work to marvel at them. And anyway, it’s all about the relaxing drink. Tequila Sunrise is fine as a song title but not recommended as part of lifestyle.

I have an idea was have a lot of stairways to the moon in the east but we just don’t get excited about them the way the touters do in Broome. On our previous trips we have missed the full moon rising. This time we were on schedule to savour the spectacle.

The best thing about it was the French. We chummed up with Francois, Claudina, Pasqual and Valerie from Avignon in the Roebuck Bay caravan park and told them about the staircase.  Off we went to the water with chairs, wine and beer. We proceed to have a convivial evening and, as darkness fell, walked over to join the throng at the lookout.

Clouds and bushfire smoke had been lurking all day. The moon tried to peer through but we had only a brief glimpse of a red orb. Happily waving my glass of red, I made a futile photographic foray and then enlisted the help of some young blokes. One held the wine while I tried to shoot; we swapped roles and that was a little better. Well that's dubious (above).

We wandered back with the French and had another drink. I apologised for the pathetic staircase. They didn’t care. They were happy to be chatting in broken English and my appalling French.

On their fourth trip to Australia, they were from a French 4WD club and were romping around the unpaved highways of the NT and WA in a couple of Britz motorhomes.

We went back two nights later for the moon’s last attempt for the month to build a staircase. Even more of a fizzer.

Meanwhile speculation was running rife in Broome about a massive steel-framed marquee for about 500 that had been put up in front of the luxury Cable Beach Club Resort. Friends in the accommodation business told us it was all hush-hush. The whole resort had been booked out and organisers spilled over to nearby resorts. Chefs had to sign confidentiality forms and leave their mobiles and cameras at home.

A story was out that it was a big Commonwealth Bank convention but some preferred the Brangelina wedding speculation. As the marquee came down, no announcement was made that Ange and Brad had tied the knot. Nor had anyone else famous so if you have Commonwealth Bank shares you might want to run your eye over entertainment expenses in the next balance sheet.

Broome, of course, also has expensive pearls, awkward camel rides at sunset at Cable Beach and outrageous prices for beer at the Roebuck Bay hotel. We once again passed on the pearls and ships of the desert but had to find somewhere to watch the Bledisloe Cup.

At $9 a pot, it was sort of worth it to me because the weather was conducive to drinking coldies and the All Blacks won. Tony took solace in looking at the lightly clad bar attendants as the Wallabies wobbled again. 

Separation has so many aspects. Six degrees of separation link everyone on the planet. (It might be five now as travel and communication skyrocket). We were delighted to find we were even more closely linked, via Tony’s sister Barb, with Percy the parrot.

Percy the sulphur crested cockatoo, to whom we were linked by only three degrees, is one of the best behaved parrots we have ever met. She needs to be.

She’s travelling Australia with Ross and Iryna Lawn from Rockhampton and gets to go to all the good places, usually perched on Ross’s shoulder. Ross and Percy are inseparable but occasionally she hops aboard someone who stops to chat.

We stopped to do that in Broome’s Chinatown (ABOVE) because Tony had spotted the parrot that morning in our caravan park. As Percy popped on to Tony’s shoulder, Ross and Iryna explained they acquired the male bird three years ago. By the time they found out Percy was a sheila, the name was rusted on to the parrot.

Iryna, we learned, had grown up in Maryborough.  She pricked her ears at our surname. Bates? She had been besties in primary school with a Barbara Bates – yep, Tony’s younger sister. She had been Iryna Taraschtchuk, whose father and brother worked in Walkers. Tony remembered them but not little Iryna who had had sleepovers with Barb at their Tinana home. Tony decided he must have been bush at those times.

We met up again with Iryna, Ross and Percy a couple of days later at a roadside stop south of Broome. They are just cruisin’ for a few months. Ross reckons he’s a bit over standing knee-deep in surf to catch a fish and their gem-hunting forays have petered off. Ross, who went to New Zealand for a couple of decades and spent 17 years as a Kiwi cop, has a fabulous story to tell about a brilliant sapphire find but I am not allowed to tell you about it.

We went our separate ways and met up with a Sunshine Coast chap at lovely Cape Keraudren at the southern end of 80 Mile Beach. He had not long separated with his own beloved pet that had travelled with him. The old cattle dog had not handled the 40+ heat too well and was buried near Tunnel Creek.

Mr Sunshine Coast was also morose at being separated from his dollars via the fuel bowsers. He hadn’t expected costs of more than $2 a litre out in the bush when he decided to pack up and go exploring Australia. He was travelling slowly so as not to visit bowsers too often but even so was wondering if he might need to get a job. 

Bev and Maurie Appleyard from Tamborine had a different idea of separation and were clearly not too worried about fuel costs. They are travelling around Australia for four or five months: she goes out front in a Suzuki 4WD and he drives behind in a 7m Toyota Coaster.

“I relax while I am driving but I get a bit nervous when Maurie’s driving the bigger vehicle,” explained Bev.

“We do the ‘breaker breaker’ thing. I go ahead and tell him about superduper dips and cattle and he tells me when a road train is coming up behind. I pull over because I don’t enjoy them wobbling past.”

She paused. “And it means we get to spend a bit of time apart. I don’t think that hurts.” I can hear a lot of Grey Nomad comments: “Copy that.”

We have been caught up in a couple of bushfires in the north-west and have been fascinated by burning difference between can-do people up here and flaming daftness of dwellers in the south.

A black smoke sky added to the colour contrasts of Cape Leveque, a fire burnt across and closed the Great Northern Highway trapping us at Port Smith on Eighty Mile Beach and we dodged past a few others on the way south. Up in the north, however, they have a better acceptance of the inevitably of bushfires and the need to cool burn to keep the kindling down. And of course, in the north-west, the scrubby flora is not as deadly as the tall gums in the south.

We almost choked not on smoke but on the bizarre claim by Green MP Adam Bandt, one of the most curious characters elected to the lower house. First he said Tony Abbot was to blame for the fires; later he tried to backpedal a little but was still insisting that fuel reduction was not the answer.

“If you want to reduce the amount of fuel that’s available to burn, the best thing we can do is work to get global warming under control,” he told ABC Radio. Huh? Getting global warming “under control” when human pollution is reckoned to be a factor in, not the sole cause of, our changing weather is blinkered and bizarre. Even if we could, how would that cause the lethal fuel build-ups in rural Australia to mysteriously disappear?

The Ludwig Leichardt diaries published by the Queensland Museum shine light on the endemic need for cool bushfires to rejuvenate the bush.

We have travelled a bit in the footsteps of old Ludwig. His writings about the Australian bush barely touched by Europeans are fascinating in their observations. He immersed himself in Aboriginal culture for up to nine months at a time and recorded their uncanny affinity with nature.

The Australian Review on October 19 reported: “He could see that burning brought growth, luxuriance, a profusion of animals. Burning was all around him…..

“At the time Leichardt was writing these words, the modern Australian system of land use was just being imposed and the fire-sensitive growth cycle of native plants and trees suppressed. ‘I longed,’ writes Leichardt, ‘to move those stupid enemies of fire onto such a plot of young grass to hear lectures alternatively from horses, sheep, oxen and kangaroos about the advantages of burning the old grass.’”

We don’t know if poor Ludwig is turning in his grave now because we don’t know where his bones lie. We do know he would shudder to see what is being done today by people who claim to have an affinity with the bush and a desire to preserve it.

Tony and I have driven through rural residential areas in southern states and seen lovely homes in which we would never sleep a wink. They are perched on ridges, hidden among tall trees and in the breeze path of gullies filled with highly combustible undergrowth. Green-influenced councils and state governments have put deadly limits on clearing and cool burning: in the Blue Mountains one council has a 2m limit for a firebreak around a property.  That’s like keeping Guernsey bulls out of your garden with a guipure lace fence.

We can’t blame global warming, firebugs, the odd army mishap, carelessness, escaped fires or lightning strikes for the ferocity and destructiveness. Hot days and bushfires are inevitable. We can blame lack of prescribed burning and the deadly locations of increasing numbers of houses for the intensity of the blazes and the scale of destruction.

I’m with Ludwig and Abbott in their responses to those who talk through their hats. Maybe we should cull the bush of all the silly buggers and put them back in the cities where they belong. And maybe we should get insurance companies to put high premiums on fire-risk locations and/or council areas run by dippy greenies who think they save the land by prohibiting clearing and preventative burning.

Why should our insurance premiums go up to pay to replace homes of those who keep blindly ignoring today’s evidence and observations of explorers 200 years ago?